HBO has a new documentary series coming out about a high school football team that is both exactly what you'd expect from this genre and completely different.
Undoubtedly pitched as The Wire meets Last Chance U, "The Cost of Winning" focuses on Baltimore's St. Frances Academy, described in the trailer as "one of the poorest schools in the country in one of the toughest neighborhoods in the country." Except this series comes with a twist -- as the title implies, St. Frances Academy is too successful.
The Washington Post did a great deep dive into the program last year, but here's a good two-paragraph primer:
Only three years ago, the St. Frances Panthers were a laughingstock. They were from a tiny, under-resourced black Catholic high school in a bleak pocket of Baltimore. There was little money for coaches or uniforms or travel. Their MIAA rivals regularly beat them by double digits. In 2010, they lost every game. In 2015, they won only two.
That all changed with the arrival of (Biff) Poggi, who had led the tony Gilman School — his alma mater and one of the MIAA’s richest schools — to 13 league championships in 19 years. In addition to being a successful coach, Poggi is a wealthy businessman, and when he came to St. Frances, he brought his money with him — so far pouring $2.5 million into the football team and the school. In just three years, he has helped build a juggernaut of a program, with players receiving football scholarship offers from the likes of Clemson, Alabama and Oklahoma.
The SFA Panthers were reportedly expelled from their conference for winning too much, too violently, and the title tells us there was a racial motivation to SFA's expulsion. Judging from what we've seen thus far, the series will focus on the coaches' and teachers' efforts to use football as their players' slingshot out of Baltimore and on to a better life.
The trailer also includes this great quote from an as-yet-unidentified player:
"We know the truth so we don't let that get to us. We just hit them even harder."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEsHOHgXvEM
There's a saying that football is like pizza: when it's great, it's incredible; and when it's bad, it's still pizza.
Football documentaries operate in much the same way. When they're bad, they're still a behind-the-curtain look at how one team operates. But when they're good, they're a case study in American life. Here's hoping HBO's resources can turn "The Cost of Winning" into the latter.
The series is cut into four parts, but really it's a two night deal. The first two episodes will air back-to-back on Sunday night, and the last two will air Monday night.